Sunday, 17 February 2013

Nora Sawyer: Herrick's "The Coming of Good Luck", from Nora Sawyer, 16 February 2013

The brilliant Nora, who obviously has a great knack for intuiting the significations of feline body language, has
generously offered credit on this one to our pack of lovable furry
slouches ("Cats inspired by Angelica and Tom Clark’s menagerie") -- as
though, on top of all that continuous feeding and pampering, they
deserved more favours still. And of course they do believe they do. In
an unheated house in midwinter, once the food supply has been taken care
of by the obedient minions, the #1 cat objective remains arranging the
physique so as to absorb maximum warmth from whatever source. They are
slinky geniuses at this essential skill: or ought one call it an actual
art, the art of keeping the blood properly warmed?

Surely Robert Herrick (1591-1674), that master miniaturist, would have appreciated all this fine artistry, of cat and woman in equal measure.
Trained from childhood in the arts of the very fine, Robert (or Robin,
as he was called) was the son of a London goldsmith, Nicholas Herrick
(who died mysteriously in the poet's infancy), and was apprenticed at
the age of sixteen to another goldsmith in the family, his uncle William
Herrick (the apprenticeship ended when Robert went up belatedly to
Cambridge). From early on, the poet was plainly enchanted -- we have
the evidence of all his life and work -- by those small and delicate
nuances of the everyday phenomenal world which make it such a pleasant
place to inhabit. Perhaps most specifically and particularly if you're a
cat, being "tickel'd by degrees",

Not all at once, but gently, as the trees
Are, by the Sun-beams...

Last week's one deceptively springlike day had the gang of furs jockeying for window-position and draping themselves in proximity to, then basking with
temporary satisfaction in, a few surprising and, at this time of year,
unfamiliar solar rays, passing across their domain and trickling down
through the bare branches. For them there is no tomorrow to worry about
or feel contented in, only the eternal bliss of the mysterious apparition of the right-now,
to be enjoyed... snore... by degrees. No one's told them the forecast
warns of dramatically dipping temperatures, fierce thunderstorms,
lightning strikes, small hail and... but they wouldn't be paying attention anyhow, not unless the fleas happened to be biting. They live in a world that is entirely physical. There are of course sometimes bad things in that world. But the good, well, here again Robin Herrick probably expressed it best, in a little poem called "Casualties":

Good things, that come of course, far lesse do please,
Then those, which come by sweet contingencies.

Reading Herrick I'm often put in mind of a diary note made by another great artist of the epiphanies of the contingent, the wonders of the subtle and the small, Joseph Cornell, who commented (9 December 1948, a Wednesday) on "the 'all over' feeling that makes of the incidental a never ceasing wonder and spectacle of the spiritual".

Reflecting on Cornell's note and its implications,
it's possible to understand why, for this reader, many a tiny and
seemingly "momentary" Herrick poem endures and pleases over time in a way that, to take an illustrious example from the same century, Paradise Lost does not.

It was the century of poetry, for our language, the
century in which poetry came to be the glory of the language that it is.
The critic who offered perhaps the best overview on this, Basil Willey, wrote in The Seventeenth Century Background (1934): "It was one of the privileges of the seventeenth
century to be able to believe, without any effort or striving, that
'truth' was not all of one order. It would be more accurate to say that
this was unconsciously assumed, or felt, rather than consciously
'believed'. Thus however eager one might be for the old 'exantlation'
of one kind of truth, the new kind, the old order of numinous truth was
still secure in its inviolate separateness. The feeling that there was a
divine meaning, an otherness, in the universe, as well as a
mechanical order, was still natural and inevitable; it had not, as so
often since, to be deliberately worked up or simulated."

Of course getting the cats to buy into this sort of
thinking would be another matter. Perhaps they'd be better inclined to consider it if the message came wrapped in a felt mouse stuffed with catnip.

8 comments:

Three years ago, by the way, this poem was posted here in the original text from Herrick's sole book of verse, the magnificently various Hesperides (1648). Alas, however, no kitties in the picture that time round.

And when we consider that lovely delicate little poem has the rather grim title, "Upon himselfe being buried", we see that Herrick's beautiful light touch never left him, even (or perhaps especially) when his thoughts were occupied with the most weighty of matters.

The third poem above that one, in Hesperides, works the same sort of magical uplift-from-the-mortal-coil.

To his Tomb-maker

Go I must; when I am gone,Write but this upon my Stone;Chaste I liv'd, without a wife,That's the Story of my life.Strewings need none, every flowerIs in this word, bachelour.

This reminds us of the poet's love of flowers -- here the play upon Centaurea cyanus, the common cornflower or "bachelors button" (once said to be worn by young men in love).

The modern poet who perhaps reminds me most of Herrick, in the lightness of touch and love of common flora, is James Schuyler (another bachelor, as it happens).

Here he writes of cornflowers as "ragged scraps of sky... tattered tales of my life."